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The Word Salad Abuse Tactic
When the conversation makes less and less sense the harder you try to make yourself understood.
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You know that kind of argument that leaves you feeling like you’ve just walked out of a room where somebody was speaking a language you technically understand but couldn’t quite decipher?
You brought up one specific thing that hurt you, and somehow forty minutes later you’re defending yourself against accusations about something you did three Christmases ago, an implication that you’re selfish, a philosophical argument about what ‘respect’ means, an accusation that you’re always unsatisfied or ;splitting hairs’ about everything and a completely unrelated complaint about your mother.
You try to bring the conversation back to the original point. He changes the subject again.
You clarify what you meant. He tells you that’s not what you said.
You explain what you actually said. He explains why what you actually said proves something else.
Eventually you’re exhausted, confused and wondering whether you somehow lost the plot.
This is what I mean by word salad. Experts sometimes also call it the narcissistic word salad, but I find that most abusers and wannabe manipulators use it, even beyond those who would qualify for an official diagnosis.
He doesn’t need to be a narcissist to want to confuse you into submission; he just needs to be a man who adopted the typical patriarchal beliefs and patriarchal weapons, which is to say most men.
I’m not talking about somebody who occasionally communicates badly, gets flustered during an argument or struggles to articulate a complicated feeling. Human beings are messy communicators. Sometimes people genuinely misunderstand each other.
I’m talking about a repeated pattern in which communication becomes increasingly incoherent whenever you’re trying to establish something concrete, resolve a disagreement, hold someone accountable or get a straight answer.
And the important thing to understand is that the conversation doesn’t have to make sense for it to be doing its job. Sometimes, confusing you IS the point.
Nonsense can be a strategy
Emotional abuse doesn’t always look like someone aggressively insisting that you’re wrong. Sometimes it looks like someone making it impossible for you to establish what the argument is even about.
You say, ‘I asked you not to speak to me like that.’
He says, ‘Well, you speak to me like I’m some kind of monster, so maybe you should think about why I react that way.’
You say, ‘I’m talking about what you just said.’
He says, ‘No, you’re always doing this thing where you focus on one little detail instead of looking at the bigger picture.’
You ask what bigger picture he’s talking about. Now you’re discussing your childhood. Then his childhood. Then your tone. Then something you supposedly did six months ago. Then whether you’re ‘always looking for problems’.
At some point you realize you’ve been talking for an hour and you’re no closer to answering the original question than you were when the conversation began. That IS the point.
A person who wants to resolve a disagreement has at least some interest in reaching the actual disagreement. They might disagree with your version of events. They might defend themselves or be angry, but there is still some recognizable relationship between what you said and what they’re responding to.
The word salad destroys that relationship. The conversation becomes a maze. And if you spend enough time trying to navigate the maze, you eventually forget why you entered it.
Here’s how to recognize it and fight back...
